NOTE: Needless to say, all characters and events in this story are fictional in their entirety. Some readers may find parts of the story uncomfortable or even disturbing. Strong language has been used on occasion to emphasize the gravity of a situation and is not in any way a reflection of my own views or feelings of the subject at hand.


Hello! My name is Sachita.
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Sachita Chettri-Sharma-Shrestha. Those of you familiar with caste dynamics in Nepal might have noticed my last name, besides being ridiculously long, spans three castes. Depending on how well versed you are with Nepali last names, you might even have noticed that each of my last names, given to me by my creator, is a very generic one. Peel off those generic layers, and I could be Sachita Thapa-Dixit-Rajbhandari. Or Sachita Budathoki-Pudasaini-Gurbacharya. History has tossed some amazing ingredients into Nepal's melting pot and in the process my last name has become a witches brew of what surely must have been the mad quest of my overzealous forefathers to conquer the frontiers of genetics in their bedroom. What a twisted sense of humor my forefathers and creator must have possessed - the former to leave behind a legacy of lengthy and bizarre-sounding last names and the latter to use them with great glee and fervour when he could easily have called me something else.

My creator made me a woman because he was studying women, trying to demystify them. Like in the movie, "Being John Malkovich", he was working on a project to enter the mind of a human to figure out how it really works. He chose a woman because he was fed up of the battle for the remote control, the most symbolic of the gender wars that have plagued our planet since the roaring success of Womens Lib. He spent hours reading about female psychology and secretly tried his theories of man-woman dynamics on the countless unsuspecting women he ran into everyday. They were harmless theories that caused no damage to the physical, psychological or emotional well being of the women in question. Like his theory on who appreciates pleasantries more - men or women - and why. As harmless as that. Before you conjure up images of a Hannibal Lecter or Baazigar's Shahrukh Khan let loose on Sajha, put your fears, if any, to rest. He was as harmless as the Pope. In fact, he had even tried to enter the mind of the Pope a couple of times only to be chased away by the Pope's stubborn refusal to accept his intrusion as a noble experiment in science and instead treat it with the same suspicion the Catholic church has treated , say, evolution or condoms with.

The desire to read minds or enter the mind of another person is perhaps as old as human thought. Religion is about making you believe there is someone who knows your every thought, your deepest and darkest secrets. God is to be feared because he knows everything you are thinking. Like that one incident of sexual abuse you faced as a child, that does not bother you anymore, but whose memories come rushing back to you whenever someone lavishes praise on your then young and foolish uncle. Google tells you it was definitely abuse, yet your heart tells you it was just a stupid mistake he made. No one knows about it because they cant read your mind and you wont speak your mind. Or the thoughts of that one lesbian encounter in your all-girls high school that come back to you in your dreams typically on those lonely nights when your husband is out of town on business and your sons are fast asleep in their rooms.

Back in the old days, trying to get into someones mind could easily have been mistaken for wizardry or witchcraft. A dhami or jhakri would have been summoned to excorcise the ghosts out if you were in Nepal. Or you would have been burnt alive if you had been born in the Europe of the middle ages like Joan of Arc. The world is dominated by men and they resist the idea of smart and intelligent women invading what has been their domain since the days of bipedalism - power and dominance. So when it comes to reading minds, the all-pervasive patriarchy will never let women get ahead. Back then women who dared to think and follow their own star and heed their inner callings were called witches. These days they are simply called bitches. Immolation has been made illegal but cleverly crafted castigation has not.

***

"In the beginning was an idea, and the idea was with him, and the idea was him "
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Many have tried to enter the mind of another only to find their efforts run against the insurmountable wall separating the meta from the physical. That is till my creator came along and stumbled upon his remarkable invention. He had been expelled from MIT for hacking into the school Registrar's computer system and altering the grades of his friends. To avoid legal action and forcible deportation , he had packed his bags and quietly headed back to Nepal. It was there, one autumn evening, that he ran into his old friend Suvit. My creator was the thinker, the dreamer, the creative guy. Suvit was the scientist, the doer, the realist who turned my creator's thoughts into physical reality. As a Kathmandu Municipality sweeper swept the yellow poplar leaves that had fallen from the Keshar Mahal compound onto the side walk on Tridevi Marg, my creator and Suvit sat on the veranda of Himalayan Java and sipped fresh arabica coffee grown in Myagdi. They had been batch mates in high school and were catching up on old times. They joked about the strict principal and lenient vice principal and how the boys used to try and play one against the other only to be outsmarted by them both. They recalled the numerous bunking excursions to the movie theater and the Chinese restaurant in town and how they were caught one time and 'gated' for the summer holidays.

My creator told Suvit about an idea he had. He reasoned that beneath our skin and inside of our flesh and bones, we are but a collection of tissues undergoing chemical reactions. Our tissues comprise of compounds which in turn comprise of the elements on the periodic table. Each of those elements break down further into electrons, protons and other sub-atomic particles. If there was a way all the body's mass were separated at the atomic level into electrons and then sent over the fiber optic cables that criss-crossed the world and re-assembled on the other end, one could travel from the US to Nepal as fast as email or words in a chat session. An input device plugged in via the USB port on your laptop would launch you in your electronic form into the vast expanse of the information super highway and take you to your destination at the speed of light. You could be scanned into your computer at your apartment in New York and show up via the scanner in your dad's home office in Kathmandu.

"Think of all the possibilities" my creator grinned

"Or all the bugs that could plague the system, especially if it runs on Vista" Suvit jokingly retored "What if you came out as another person on the other end?"

"Oh damn, what if you come out as Phoolan Devi, huh, Suvit?"

"And you as Hishila Yami!"

They both laughed at the absurd comedy of errors.



****

The flight of the bumble bee
--------------------------------

My creator often liked to talk about the flight of the bumble bee. Not so much Rimsky-Korsakov's musical interlude in The Tale of the Tsar Saltan but the aerodynamic principles involved in the flight of this remarkable insect. According to the theories of aerodynamics, as demonstrated by means of a wind tunnel, the bumble bee is unable to fly. The weight, size and shape of its body in relation to it's wing span make flight impossible. Yet the bumble bee, ignorant of the odds stacked against it, and driven by its survival instinct, or sheer determination as my creator liked to put it, manages to fly - and also make some honey in the process.

"Alak Niranjan!" Jogi Parmanand announced his arrival and thumped his walking stick on the wooden floor of the porch outside the house where my creator had been staying as a paying guest. It was a beautiful morning in Pithoragarh in the Kumaon Himalayas. The rays of the morning rose over the hills of the Saur Valley, pierced through a hole in the WWII-era green plain-cloth curtain and hit my creator on the face. He rubbed his eyes and turned in bed thinking, wishing, it was all a dream. He heard Paramanand's distinct voice again "Wake up, beta, we have a long journey ahead of us. We need to leave early."


To be continued...

Sajhagazer, wow !! Very nicely and well chosen words. Looking forward for more..

Welcome back, SajhaGazer. Its been so long u disappeared. Im one of the biggest fans of yours. For me u and sumoff r the most talented English writers here in Sajha. Please keep coming.

Whenever I see your stories, I always remember your excellent piece I MET HER IN SAJHA. That was too good.

I have only gone through few lines of your this story but to be honest, it was not that much interesting. I just stopped reading, perhaps i will do it later. Im sure its good coz its sajhagazer branded

Thank you all for reading. Hello and muchos muchos gracias to those leaving behind their thoughts.

Part 2 follows this post.

 Part 2 : Sachita What's-Her-Face
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Some of mankind's greatest discoveries and inventions have been accidents. Alexander Flemming discovered penicillin by accident. He had  returned  from a long holiday and noticed  mould growing on one of the  Petri dishes he had left out for cleaning. Upon closer examination, he further noticed it had killed off the bacteria originally cultured on the dish. The first antibiotic was thus discovered adding years to human life expectancy. I was invented by mistake too. I am a piece of software installed on a tiny a chip implanted in the fore brain of my creator. The chip uses patented technology to detect, capture and process electrical signals in the brains of others and pass them on to the brain of my creator. That's how he read minds. It took Suvit and him, and later just him,  about two and a half years to come up with this invention that was never meant to be.

What's more, my creator's birth, like mine, was an accident. He liked to joke that he was the result of poor quality control at Nepal Contraceptive Retail Services Company, Lainchaur. His birth was the result of someone's else mistake. His life too was the result of other people's mistakes. He had a tomcat of a father and a slut of a mother. Which came first - his dad's visits to the whorehouse or his mom's flings with Kathmandu's high society - was like asking the chicken and egg question. Regardless of the order of precedence, each behavior fed the other. His grandparents whisked him away to boarding school in Nainital to shelter him from the heavy artillery in the battlefield his once peaceful home had become. Chairs, tables, cups, mugs, glasses, telephones were hurled inside the house like Scud missiles pounding Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. His tears were the closest thing he had to the Patriot interceptor missiles that were supposed to destroy the Scuds in mid-air. Like the Patriot missiles, his interceptor's hit-miss ratio was fifty-fifty. He parents would sometimes cease their fire but other times completely ignore the tsunami of tears he shed and carry on their endless, senseless  war.

I was meant to be part of a process to detect the electric field in a human body and compress electrons into packets of data that could be transmitted around the world. I was to be the software that would operate the underlying hardware which consisted of electro-magnetic sensors, gauges and  processing centers. I was  the glue to  hold together the different components of their earth-shattering invention

One day things changed. My creator and Suvit parted ways. Suvit's sister fell in love with my creator. He  initially resisted  her advances because she was his best friend's sister. His relationship with Suvit was more important to him than her love for him. Then one cold wintry afternoon, and she curses herself to this day for it,  she kissed him. He kissed her back. Before they knew it, they were in my creator's bedroom giving vent to to the fires that burnt within.  His defences  crumbled to the ground like a house of cards. A man often thinks with his penis. When he does not, he can only put up so much resistance to persistence from the other side. As Murphy's law would have it, during their third sexual encounter, Suvit caught them red-handed, stormed out of the room, trashed the laboratory they had built in a rented place in Baneshwor, and never spoke to my creator again. My creator stopped speaking to Suvit's sister soon after.

With an enemy for a best friend and a family more ravaged than war-torn Bosnia, my creator sought solace in the hills of Kumaon and Garwhal.  Nepal epitomized everything that was wrong about life. The war, the strikes, the pollution, the traffic he loathed them all. When the Maoists weren't fighting the Army, his mother was ambushing his father over one thing or another and his father, a staunch believer in the Powell doctrine, was retaliating with overwhelming fire power reducing his mom to a vessel of tears. When there wasn't a Nepal banda outside, there was a strike in his mother's kitchen. "Don't those whores feed you? You shameless bastard, you dog, you fu*k every bitch you can sniff and then come home and expecting hot food? My foot! "

Have you ever heard your mother swear? I haven't since I never had one and don't know how it feels to have a mother let alone one who swears. My creator never swears. He doesn't drink or smoke either. He speaks with a soft voice and has a smile that can light up a cave

My creator met Jogi Parmanand by accident. Disillusioned with the world, he decided to take time off from his life and travel. It was his childhood dream to explore the Valley of Flowers, tucked away in the  high altitudes of the Garhwal  Himalayas. Legend has it that there is a lake close to the Valley and  late in the summer, the wind  blows the beautiful yellow, red, purple, pink and  orange petals from the valley and covers the lake to form a  magnificent natural cornucopia. Those who have seen it have said it is unlike anything   anywhere else in the world.  According to the same legend, those who take a dip in the petal-covered icy waters of the lake have their sorrows washed away and attain perpetual bliss.

He had stopped in Haridwar on the way to the Valley of Flowers. A flower seller outside the Mansa Devi temple, upon finding out where he was from, motioned  him to a cottage where a "Nepali baba" lived. He said the baba was  a nice man and was interested in meeting people from Nepal. He was supposed to posses curative powers to rid people of diseases like cancer and diabetes. None of which my creator believed but driven by sheer curiosity he decided to pay a visit to see what a Nepali sadhu would be like.


The hop of the bumble bee
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When Suvit walked out, the lab resembled the scene in my creators house after a big fight. It was six months before my creator returned to the lab again. Fresh from his  trip to India and  rejuvenated by Jogi  Parmanand's example of the bumble bee, he set out to revive and complete the abandoned project. He had lost his best friend to lust and he was going to finish his friend's work as a tribute to their friendship. When optical travel became a reality, he would share the credit with Suvit. They would be the new Larry Page and Sergey Brin and their company would overtake Google as the most sought after technology company in the world. Suvit would surely forgive him when he saw how earnestly my creator sought his forgiveness.  He would also hire the best marriage counsellors and psychotherapists to fix his parent's dysfunctional marriage. He would not hesitate to pay off the Colombian drug cartels to knock off anyone  who so much as dared lay a glimpse on his beautiful mom and  his dashing dad. He would take his grandparents on a helicopter pilgrimage to Mt Kailash . As for the expulsion from MIT, when you are that famous, they would probably be willing to brush that incident under the carpet as an act of youthful indiscretion. 

My creator finally managed to put together a prototype of  the first component of the optical travel system : the electron compressor. It could, in theory, dismantle elements into their sub-atomic components, pack the electrons into data packets, transmit them using TCI/IP, the standard protocol used on the internet  and re-assemble packets on the other end. While testing the prototype, he faced an uphill challenge in detecting electrical activity in the human body. The intensity of the electromagnetic field varied by body part and he realized he needed different compression mechanisms for each part of the body. Since the brain seemed to have the most readily detectable electric field, he decided to focus his efforts on the brain.

The microwave was an accidental discovery when Percy LeBaron Spencer noticed the radar waves he was experimenting with melted the chocolate bar in his pocket. In contrast, Dr Frankenstein's monster, albeit fictional, was not so accidental.

"Luck favors the prepared mind" my inventor was not going to let anything go wrong.

To be continued

so far so good.  Liking it.

Hey gazer, why don't you paste the 2nd part to the 1st part now that sajha allows editing.  Would be much more convenient for those who read this thread after 19 replies are receive hereon.

Samsara, thanks. Not to worry about the story vanishing in the replies. This doesn't seem to be the type of a story to elicit a large volume of response. Lets say this bee aint got the wings it needs to fly. Thanks for the concern anways.

Part 3 follows.

 

WARNING: STRONG READER DISCRETION ADVISED. This piece depicts explicit content that some readers may find discomforting. My intent is merely to depict reality within the confines of fiction and not to cause offense. 

 

Part 3: Sachita Whatever-Happened-To-Her
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The silicon chip was to be planted under the skin of the forehead because the forehead had no hair and therefore had more exposure to the outside environment than other parts of the brain. The chip was self-learning, meaning it could store, analyze and use information it had come across. It was also self-healing whereby it could  correct any errors encountered in the process of its operations. Lastly, it was self-destructible meaning under a certain set of defined conditions, such as an external command,  it could cease to function.

My creator, on painkillers for the last two hours, cleaned the center of his forehead with Dettol, used a blade to make a small cut in his skin and inserted the chip, applied anti-bacterial ointment, and used a Handyplast to cover up the puncture in his skin. My body is petite in size. Smaller than the clipped nail of your pinky finger.

Within seconds the monitoring device hooked onto his laptop picked up first the signal from his brain. It  started with blip on the screen and soon turned into a deluge of electrical activity. He smiled at the sight. The joy generated a distinct type of current. As did his anxiety, pain, frustration, affection, anger, jealousy, greed, sexual desires, hunger, thirst as I slowly learned.  I noted the chemical composition of his synaptic fluids at the time as well as his heart rate, breathing rate, adrenalin and hormone levels during each of these events. I was programmed to measure sub atomic activity and duly memorized my findings.

It was on the second day of my existence that I noticed interference in the electrical field. It was early in the morning and his maid had come to serve him tea. She was a women with gray hair, wrinkled skin and large eyes. I detected a new kind of electrical current. The intensity of the current varied with how close she was to my creator. I was picking up her electric fields.

"I know how much you love me, Ishwari didi" my creator blurted in his sleep

"You must have read my mind, raja, I was just thinking of that" exclaimed Ishwari didi, his mother's helper, and the one source of consistent  love for him in his family. "I don't know how I will handle your wife when you get married. She better treat you better than I do"

"Didi, don't fight with her" my creator said

"You read my mind again, I was just thinking I will kick her out of the house if she didn't treat you right".

The electrical activity was overwhelming. The system could experience an overload if  multiple current fields were detected faster than they could be processed.

"This may not be my own house, but I have raised you since you were little, and if she so much as asks you to fetch her a glass of water, I am going to drag her out by her hair"

"Just like your mother-in-law once did to you when you came home late ?" my creator smiled and asked..

"How do you know all this stuff, raja. I dont  ever recall telling you" an astonished Ishwari di replied

"I have a headache" my creator said.

The chip crashed. Upon automatic reboot, the self-healing adapter kicked in and picked up unprocessed activities. Total downtime of missed activity was 180 seconds. What transpired in those seconds I dont know. The next recorded signal started with Ishwari didi wiping a tear from the corner of her eye as she rubbed my creators head and asked "How did you fall to cut your forehead like that?"

***

When I first saw my creator's mother, she was coming home and he was leaving and they crossed each other at the main door of the house.  I detected a strong but short-lived signal in him denoting affection. This was  immediately followed by a longer signal denoting anger. As she got closer to him, I picked up activity from her brain that  I had come to associate with affection. It was the strongest such activity I had recorded till then. Much more intense and lasting than that detected in Ishwari di.

"Mamu, don't worry I'll be back soon. I'll eat dinner at Ranjan's place" my creator told her

"I was just going to ask you that. Ok, that's fine. Don't drive too fast" she said as he tied his laces and went out the door

"Are you okay? " she asked after him

"Yeah, and I wont drink at his place"

"He is such a drunkard, I was just thinking about that. That whole family is full of drunkards. They will all have liver cirrhosis pretty soon if they go on this way"

***

The initial signals I detected when I first saw his dad were of anger and apathy on my creator's part. There was jealousy and frustration on his dad's part. It was late at night when the doorbell rang, the servants were fast asleep, and my creator had gone down to open the door knowing full well who would be ringing the door bell at that hour.

He shut the door after his dad and was getting ready to bolt it, a common practice in robbery-prone Kathmandu, when he blurted out "Yes, I have made love".

"What!? I will give you two tight slaps. What are you talking about? Who asked you that?" his dad's eyes were as big as an angry tiger's

"I dont know, I thought you did" he replied

"Are you drunk? Are you taking drugs?"  his dad said  but surprisingly retreated upstairs without  pushing the matter further "Somat nabhako keta"

" I could have sworn I heard him ask if I had ever made love" he muttered to himself

He went upstairs to his room and remembered Sachita, my namesake, also Suvit's sister. He loved her. He desired her. He recalled every moment of their time together. An increase in the levels of vnorepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, nitric oxide (NO) and  prolactin was observed. He fell asleep soon after.

"My dad thinks I am a handsome kid. Ha, ha, what a joke. I'll never sell my looks to the devil like he did" his electrical activity decreased significantly after that point.

***

I had been programmed to find and re-position myself to that point in the brain that was most conducive to detecting electrical activity. I  had to  move away from under the skin on his forehead to a much deeper position within his head. By then I had become  cognizant of the different types of emotions he experienced and the physical events that triggered them. I could tell what made him happy and what made him sad. I could tell why he would get angry and what he would do when he was angry. I learnt what food he liked and how he liked them cooked and served. I knew whom he liked and hated. I knew who liked him and who did not.  I learnt of those slim bodied girls with long silky hair on TV he desired and what exactly those desires involved. I knew of the books he read and movies he watched growing up that bred those types of desires.

***

He went to the passport office  to renew his  passport in preparation for his trip to America. He was going to visit Srijan, his childhood friend and cousin. At the issuing counter, I detected resentment signals from the issuing officer. There was greed too. He thought my creator must have money and began to think of  a way of telling him his  passport could not be issued till next week unless he paid a small sum under the table. My creator, acting on my findings, and  without being asked, said he was a college student and smiled. He got his new passport the next day.

He went to Yeti Travels to pick up his tickets. The girl behind the counter served him with great reverence because of his family's connections to her boss. Midway through their conversation, he smiled. I detected a short blip of sexual tension in her that quickly faded. I passed this information to my creator. At the end of the twenty-minute conversation, they had exchanged email addresses. This was not the first time his smile had resulted in blips of sexual tension in the opposite sex, or one occasion, as a placard-carrying Blue Diamond Society rally marched by , on people of his own sex.

He visited the Annanpurna Coffee Shop right after getting his tickets. He sipped cappuchino and ordered a pineapple pastry. The waitress was expecting a fifteen-rupee tip. He thought he'd give her thirty and share his happiness.

***

The runaway bumble bee
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He became aware of the unintended consequences of my existence one day  at a wedding reception. As buttoned-up waiters served cocktails and appetizers to the five hundred-plus guests at The Everest Hotel in Baneshwor, his mom glanced at Pradip uncle. I deteced love and lust in her; he detected love and lust in her. He hated her. The thought of her with any man, even his father, was disgusting enough. The whole idea of her with that fatso Pradip made him sick.

His father meanwhile, slightly inebriated from the three pegs of Chivas Regal he had consumed, looked at Kaushalya aunty and right there, before his very eyes, he vividly saw them naked in bed!

Shocked, he closed his eyes and covered them with his hands. What was happening to him? This had never happened before and he didn't know what to do.I  have now learnt to  decipher  electric signals from other people's memory centers and serve  them up as real images to the vision processing parts of my creator's brain.

Soon he saw the lives of every one around flash in front of him. How Rana uncle hated Bahuns. How Sharma uncle could not stand Ranas, Shahs and Thakuris. How Amatya uncle though Bahuns and Chettris should be  driven out of the Kathmandu Valley,confined to a concentration camp in India and starved to death wearing only  their janais. How Pandey uncle thought Newars should be exterminated along with all the water buffaloes in Nepal. How they all loathed Madesis or "Marshyas" as Shrestha uncle thought of them.

He did not want to know these things. Rana uncle, Shrestha uncle and Sharma uncle were some of the finest people he knew. They were the creme de la creme of Nepali society. Educated at the finest institutions in the world, they were the best Nepal had to offer. It was painful and unbearable for him to find out that those he had thought of as heroes harbored such dark prejudices and hate inside them. Doctors, engineers, pilots, lawyers, politicians, teachers, bankers, businessmen, industrialists, chartered accountants,  business analysts, IT specialists, farmers, landlords, shopkeepers, spiritual leaders were all no different from  barbarians and savages in the deepest corners of their minds. Their smiles, their handshakes, their degrees, name, fame and wealth were just pretty edifices hiding the rotten and stinking garbage decaying inside of them.

He could not bear it anymore and ran out of the hotel. He drove as fast as he could towards Maharajgunj. There were times when he was momentarily blinded by too many images forming in front of him. His mind was seeing things his eyes were not. He could not differenciate between the physical reality his eyes saw and the virtual reality his mind created. He seemed to be constantly moving back and forth between them and could not tell when or where one stopped and the other started. As he passed fifty-feet from a cop in Durbar Marg, he heard the cop softy cursing and swearing  about arrogant mother-fu**ers driving like  mad men. The cop wanted the Maoists to overrun the valley and imprison all those  rich and  corrupt people who drove expensive cars that were smuggled into the country. He yearned for a day when the rich would plough the fields and patrol the traffic and he would live in one of their mansions.

Amidst all this, my creator saw Jogi Parmanand standing on the side walk and slowed down to offer him a ride. How come there was a lake in Durbar Marg right outside of Sherpa Hotel? Why was Mr Dwivedi, his high-school physics teacher, standing with a peace sign infront of Nirulas? What an ugly beard he had grown.

He then heard a deafening bang. His blood pressure immediately dropped and his heart rate  fell. He felt sharp pain in his head and chest. Overall electrical activity in his brain dipped to a very low level. He was not speaking or moving. His head was on the steering wheel. There were footsteps running towards the car.


To be continued

 

Part 4 Sachita: Rest well, my love, rest well
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WARNING: STRONG READER DISCRETION ADVISED. This piece depicts content that some readers may find discomforting or offensive. My intent is merely to depict reality within the confines of fiction and not to cause offense

My forefathers, who art in Hindu heaven, hallowed be thy names
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My creator's father was sinfully handsome. When a man is that good looking, he gets arrogant or generous depending on how you look at it.  He thinks his looks are too good to be relished by only one woman. He therefore wants to share it with as many women as possible. Vanity is often the reason behind philandering men (and women for that matter). Bill Clinton screwed his intern because he could. My creators father screwed countless maids, co-workers, other-people's wives, mothers, aunts and daughters because he too could.

My creator came from a family of Royal priests, public servants and businessmen on his father's side. His great-grandfather,  great-great-grandfather and great-great-great-grandfathers were priests to the Kings of their times. His grand-father was educated in the West where he earned a degree in Public Administration, and was made, was amongst other things, a key advisor to Mohan Sumsher, the last Rana Prime Minister of Nepal. He was also a Bada-Hakim, an Ambassador and an Honorary General at different points in his career. Besides all these, he was a flirt, the first one to breakaway from the pious lifestyle  and monogamous bedroom habits of his forefathers.

In case you are confused, the family tree, by generation and occupation would look something like this

- My creator's great-great-great-grandfather: Royal Priest (and a pious man)
    - My creator's great-great-grandfather: Royal High Priest, bada gurujyu, (and a pious man)
        - My creator's great-grandfather : Farmer, Bichari ("thinker" or judge in the old Rana justice system) (and a generally pious man)
            - My creator's grandfather : Public Servant, Bada Hakim (governor of one of the eastern provinces), Ambassador, Honorary General (and a bedroom revolutionary)
                - My creator's father : Pilot, businessman, landlord, philanthropist (and heart-breaker and  philanderer)
                    - My creator: Scientist, MIT dropout, and later IIT graduate. Non-smoker, non-drinker, has never slept with any woman besides his true love.
                        - Me (just for laughs): A silicon chip in my creator's brain, with a happy and adventurous life thus far, with one purpose of existence: learning


People with good and happy lives are boring. I won't bore you with the details of their lives. I'll tell you, instead, about the mischief-makers, the heart-breakers and  the mistress-takers.

There are women from a particular community in Nepal who don't have pubic hair. Or so the story goes. During the Rana era, when there were no hair-removing lotions or Gillette razors, these women  were bought, forced, coerced, cajoled  into the ranks of susares, or concubines, to please their Rana and Shah masters. Like all things Rana and Shah, this practice spread over time to other Kathmandu-based families. Young spoilt brats today go to dance restaurants in Nepal in search of sex. Back in those days, you headed out of Kathmandu, beyond the all-watching eyes of Swayabhu's Buddha, away from the sight of Pashupatinath's golden roof to seek extra-marital carnal pleasure. My creator's  grandfather headed out on one such journey on a  pleasant March morning on the pretext of visiting one of his maternal uncles. This was his first such adventure, and in a fit of March madness, having experienced his first act of manhood, and  gotten carried away by the enormity of the moment, he asked the beautiful, but lower caste woman who had transformed him into a man, to marry him.

This was the Kathmandu of the early twentieth century. Chandra Shumsher was the Prime Minister. The Praja Parishad was still a few years in the making. Dasrath Chand, Dharma Bhakta Mathema, Shukra Raj Shastri and  Ganga Lal Shrestha had barley begun to build up resentment against the Ranas. Those  disgruntled and heretic Brahmins Tanka Prasad Acharya in Kathmandu and Krishna Prasad Koirala in the Terai had not yet raised their cries of revolution that would sweep the country in the decades that followed. How then could the grandson of a Royal priest marry a girl of lower caste? It was unheard of. It was unthinkable.

So when he showed up in the family home in Chettrapati with a highland girl, all hell broke loose. Kathmandu's conformist, God fearing and King-obeying Brahmin society had never before been rocked by a scandal of such magnitude and would not witness anything on the same scale till decades later when that disgruntled looser Tanke and that Madise of a Brahmin Koirala set in motion the forces that would permanently take power away from the Ranas, their relatives and the trusted circle of Brahmins and Chettris who surrounded them.

A friend of his  and a courtier in the court of Chandra Shumsher intervened. Since my creator's grandfather was not  a practicing priest in spite of having been born a Brahmin (what was the world coming to, the Bahuns were taking over Nepal by getting all these fancy degrees from hot-shot universities), he could take her in as a mistress and marry the girl whom his mother had lined up instead. In exchange, the highland girl was to be kept in a house near the jungles of Gokarna instead of the main home in Chettrapati

In the large bedroom of a cottage in Gokarna, genes mingled, bloods mixed, races crossed and out popped my creator's father one fine day "just like that" as his busy and mule-setting, Nepal- trotting dad liked to say. The love child of the then Bada-Hakim, or Chief Administrator, of an eastern province, and his bhotini (a broad brush used by Kathmandu's Thagadari (thread wearing) castes, often  in the pejorative, to describe many  Matwalis ) mistress was the darling of the neighborhood ladies. He inherited the small eyes of his mother as well as her fair skin.The large forehead and square chin came from his father. As for his nose, as Borat might say, he had the sixth most perfect nose in Kathmandu. That made him the fifth most desired man in Kathmandu only after the four unmarried scions of the extended  Rana and Shah families.

My creator's grand-father sent his sons to school in Darjeeling. He  did not discriminate between his legitimate and not-so-legitimate children. They were to get the best education he could provide and be the future masters of Nepal. Like Jung Bahadur, he harbored dreams of ruling the country and passing on the mantle to his children and their children. He envisioned an autocracy of enlightened and able Brahmins, mind you not just any Brahmins, who would be free from the feuding baggage that accompanied Jung Bahadur's clans,  free from the cold war of the Thapas and Pades, free from the  bloody and brutal history of power grabs and Kot Parbas and free of the influences of inept and henpecked Shah kings.

Damn  those two bastards Tanke and Krishne - they went too far and destroyed his dreams. Empower the masses? My goodness what blasphemy! Those uneducated Tamangs and Magars - what would they do with power? Those greedy Bahuns who could read but knew nothing about the meaning of the words they read and were only after dakshina money? They wouldn't know how to rule. Those stinking Bhotes  up north and those buffalo-eating, tatta-ra-matta-tongued Newars? They would destroy the fabric of society with their disgusting eating habits. Those hale Chettris unfit to be anything but hawaldars and perform chakari in Royal court? They would turn the country into a blood soaked battlefield and provide a free ticket to the beef-eating British to take over the country.

How he hated Tanke and Krishne. Scums!

***

The Sati Savitris - the maternal side
----------------------------------------------------

Jung Bahadur Rana did not exactly abolish the practice of Sati but declared one needed the permission of the Prime Minister to commit this heinous act. The women on my creator's mother's side were such devoted wives, they would have done anything, short of jumping into the fire, for their husbands. That's because their educated, experienced and enlightened fathers and husbands had drilled into their heads both the virtues and vices of Hinduism, at least that's what they claimed. For brevity's sake, I'll skip the family tree, and talk only about a few prominent men and women on this side of the family.

My creators maternal grandfather was a close aide to King Mahendra. He came from a family of Army officers and civil servants. Outside of Ranas, Shahs, Thapas and Pades, theirs was  the most influential Chettri family in Kathmandu. He was a bedroom revolutionary in the same mould as one of the other paternal forefathers but with one difference : he lived in more accepting times and married the daughter of a Lhasa-sau. That's not to say there weren't cultural issues in their inter-caste marriage. There certainly were; but in the post-Rana Nepal, with the winds of change sweeping the world from Budapest to Bali, the Hippies smoking themselves high on Freak street, innocent villagers lining up to smile at foreign tourists, his family was swept away in a breeze of short-lived Utopian idealism that swept Kathmandu at that time. My creator owes it to his great-grandfather, a retired Army General who read the daily papers and listened to Radio Nepal and BBC, for allowing the marriage to take place. At least she is not one of those subversive eastern Thapas he reasoned to his shell-shocked and deeply heart-broken wife who was later taken to Ranchi, Bihar for psychotherapy.

My creator's Matwali-Bahun dad met his Newari-Chettri mom at a "social" in Darjeeling. A dance party is probably the term we would use these days to describe the event. The girls were told to strictly observe the one-foot rule: you had to be dancing at least one foot away from the boys. The nuns threatened to enter the dance floor with rulers to measure the distance. Dance too close, and you would have to to bend down and they would spank your bottom with the same wooden Camel ruler.

The nuns did not have to worry. These were students from all-boys and all-girls who had no idea how to talk to anyone of the opposite sex, let alone dance with them. Most of that evening passed with the LP discs spinning the Doors, Beatles, Carpenters and other numbers and no one stepping onto the dance floor. Finally, about half an hour before the end of the dance session, a group of four girls moved shyly onto the edge of the dance floor. My creator's mother was one of the four. My creator's dad knew  her through family connections. Emboldened by the sight of a pretty acquaintance on the dance floor and drawn by the the pied-piper-like power of "Obladi-Oblada la ra la ..."  he stepped on the dance floor. All eyes in the room were on him as his friends buried their heads in embarrassment at the impending disaster that was about to unravel in front of them.

"May I dance with you miss?" He said it just like  Sean Connery in the James Bond movie that  their Principal had treated them to for winning cricket's prestigious Edinburgh Shield.

"No, no, no, no,  please, please" she blushed and pleaded against the idea. She "almost fainted" at that moment as she would tell her friends later.  

There have been few women who have said no to my creator's dad.  His face turned crimson like the maple leaves the Canadian missionary and Biology teacher kept preserved in the lab. As he turned to leave he heard  something that sounded like  "laahh, laahh, what-have-I-done"  behind him. By this time his friends had buried their heads deep into their blazers and some, unable to bear the head-on rush of embarrassment had even run out of the social hall. Just as suddenly as she had said "No, no", she appeared in front of him and said "I really don't know how to dance"

"I don't know either. Lets just do it like this" he shook his hips and moved his hands close to his abdomen just like in that 'twist' scene from the same James Bond movie.

My creator's mother was an attractive woman too but not on the same order of magnitude as her future husband. She grew up in a very sheltered environment and had very romantic ideas about what marriage should be like. Her idea of a husband was straight out of a Mills and Boons novel. My creator's dad met that expectation on one count: looks. Just one count as she would find out later but when you are sixteen that's the only count that matters.

***

Paging Dr Devkota
-----------------------------

My creator was in a coma for a full day before he came out of it, much to the relief of his family and the doctors attending to him. He jerked his knee when then doctor hit him with a  medical hammer and he responded to the EverReady-powered torch light that the nuero-surgeon almost stuck into his eyes.

"This looks good, we won't have to perform invasive surgery. The concussions might heal with medication" the doctor went on."Usually when you are in such a big car accident and there is so much concussion, the patient can go into a prolonged coma"

He saw his parents and wanted to slip away into unconsciousness again. It had been warm and peaceful where he was. He knew it would be a matter of minutes before they started fighting again.

I passed on the signals I had picked up from their brains.

He was surprised by what they were thinking.

To be continued.

gazer mate,
interesting read indeed although i must say, and this is by no means to demean the quality of story teller that you have in you, i find, at many places, the plot too technical (may not be for some but i am sure for many sajhaites) and the narrative too documentary/technical journal oriented. that made me wonder, what made you decide it's worthwhile posting it in here in sajha?

i have realized, and this is again by no means to ridicule your own skill at judging as you yourself have been around this place for a while, that  there are not many varieties of stories that you find worthwhile posting in sajha where basically, when put bluntly, sex and "photo-shopped" images of celebrities solicit more attention.

one thing i am not able to comprehend is how come 'your' creator decided to transplant the silicon chip on his forehead, which is, due to the presence of forehead bones, is a difficult place for any transplantations.  And he did it with dettol and a mere handyplast hahaha..  :P. wouldn't transplanting in hand, where most of the veins connected to the nervous system end, make more sense?

all in all, a unique read. glad to see someone putting on time to narrate stories of a different taste in sajha. kudos!

all the best.

LooTe

Good story with humuor and satire.Waiting for the ending.

Junge78: Thanks for your comment.

Lootekukur: Thanks for taking the time to read and also for your thoughts. The chip is merely a metaphor. The simplicity, or absurdity,  if you like, of how it got into his head  is part of that metaphor. 

As for the type of plot, yes, I was fully aware of it's appeal, or the lack of. In writing this story, I have been rewarded in other more fulfilling and lasting ways.

I wish you the very best.

 

Part 5 (last part) follows

 

 Part 5 Sachita: When all was said and done
-----------------------------------------


Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.

                             - T.S Elliot


At the door of death
----------------------

Good looks is no excuse for bad behavior. Wealth is no  excuse for extravagance, nor power for arrogance, nor  pedigree for contempt. His parents sat at the bedside of my creator agonizing over what had happened. Why did this have to happen? Why their innocent son? Weren't there enough bad people in Kathmandu? Why not that gangster Chakre Milan? Or that butcher Prachande?  Was this punishment for their past sins?  Chance, by definition, happens for no rhyme nor reason. The universe was the cataclysmic result of an equilibrium disturbed by happenstance.  Life formed when a stroke of lightning chanced upon a nitrous compound  minding its own business. As they watched their only child breathing through a  ventilator, they felt the air sucked out of their lungs,  their mortally wounded souls gasped for breath, their numb minds struggled to overcome the horrific calamity that had befallen them.

My creator's dad was always aware of the power of his good looks. As a child he knew what kind of face to make and when. Faced with an angry mother or aunt, he would  put up a crest-fallen look, sometimes with a sheepish smile that would solicit a round of cheek-pinching and cries of "Cho-chweet" from his elders. Or he would clench his jaw and have a far -away  and determined look in his eyes when reprimanded by an older male relative like his father, who showed up, usually at night,  once every couple of months, or his maternal uncles who visited his mom every now and then. Concerned about the emotional damage they had inflicted on him, and unable to put up with that martyred look on his face, his father or uncles would offer to play ball or badminton with him, as a way of making up for the scolding. His ability to manipulate his elders  with his looks and their apparent susceptibility to it  instilled in him  a lopsided understanding of  rewards and punishments; of right and wrong; of responsibility and recklessness.

As he grew older, he was able to factor in gender, age, culture and relationship contexts and slowly mastered the art of making faces. He knew the affect his crooked smile had on a first date, it  usually scared the hell out of his date;   yet that same angular smile, when flashed a few dates later,  could drive any woman  mad with lust. The look of sincerity and the boyish smile  opened office doors and closed business deals during the day. It also opened bedroom doors (and lingerie) at night. His looks hide his true self, his wife said of him.

"He has the face of an angel and the soul of the devil" she would say.

Yet, we all use our assets to our advantage when we can. The runner seduces by winning races, the body builder by flexing his muscles.  The actor draws attention to himself by  his acting, the writer by his stories, the poet by his poetry, the singer by his songs, the musician by his music, the politician by his speeches, the joker by his jokes, the 'nice-guy' by his nice words. What then is wrong with a handsome man showing off his looks to the world and using them to fulfill his desires? Humans by nature are philanderers; it's morality that  has caged, controlled and regulated our sexual desires. If it wasn't immoral to sleep with anyone you desired, if it didn't hurt anyone you loved, if it was logistically and financially possible to sleep with as many people as you might want, who in their right minds would suppress that urge between their legs?

Stop. Ceteris non paribus, but all other things don't remain equal, our lives don't operate in a vacuum. Immoral it might be. Hurtful it surely will be to those who love you the most. Logistical problems, yes, probably. Financial problems, possibly. Guilt, most certainly. Divorce, most likely. Dishonor, yes, this was Nepal after all.

How different was he from a pig who woke up only to eat, f*c*k and go back to sleep? Realization was a long time coming, but when it entered the cabin in Bir Hospital, it hit him hard in the head and the chest. His son was his 'aha, gotcha' answer to death. You can take my life away from me, he had told death, but my progeny will live on. You might leave me with unfulfilled dreams but my children will live my dreams. Now death was trying to out-manipulate the great manipulator, as his wife thought of him,  by taking his son way first. He wasn't going to give in so easily. We was willing to beg, borrow, steal, do anything to let his son live. He promised he would never cheat on his wife again or come home drunk. He knew how much those things hurt his son. Never again, he promised the powers that be, will I indulge in my vices; I will give everything up, if only you will let my son live.  I will put a plug on all my desires, never do anything to hurt anyone, love my wife, go to Pashupati daily, give all my property to charity, just let my son live.

***

My creator's mom married his dad soon after he returned to Nepal after completing a pilot training course in the United States. He joined the Royal Nepal Army air wing, the 11th Battalion, where his assignments included flying members of the Royal family. He left the Army to join Royal Nepal Airlines where he eventually became a Captain and after a couple of years left to found and fly the planes of Air Makalu.

He had cheated on his then fiance when he was in the US. I will stop after marriage he told himself. Stop he did for a few years. When he joined RNAC, he was only twenty-four and stunningly handsome. It first happened on a night-stop in Lukla. Rita Aunty was the air-hostess on the Twin-Otter flight from Kathmandu and Gaurav Uncle the co-pilot.  Gaurav Uncle retired to bed early that evening after drinks and dinner.  Rita Aunty and his dad  stayed on and talked in the porch of Khumbu Hotel. They talked amongst other things about ghosts and shamans. Rita aunty then told him she felt afraid to sleep alone in her room and asked him if he could give her company. Not even I, the outspoken chip, can, or wish to, get into further details.

He was logging a lot of flying hours those days. Whether it was Baglung or Bangkok, Singapore or Surket, Lukla or London, he was constantly away from home. What started with Rita Aunty continued with countless other Gita, Sita, Mita, Nita aunties over the years.

His unsuspecting wife found out when one of the air-hostess, heart-broken and out to seek revenge, called to spill the beans. He had apparently left this air-hostess for another younger and prettier one.

His wife angry as she was, had no desire to cheat on him. She could not see herself  with another man in her heart of hearts. She made friends with other men, with a deep sense of pain, only to seek his attention. She never slept with anyone. Yet, he called her a slut for merely speaking to and being friendly with people of the opposite sex. She took to drinking and gambling as a way of easing the pain. She was the only woman amongst the circle of cross-legged men playing Paplu at an old dilapidated durbar in Narayanchaur. She became the best Paplu player in Kathmandu and soon what started as a game, a past-time, a break  from the pain of a cheating husband became an addiction. She could not live without booze, cards and Pan Parag, a habit she had acquired from her fellow gamblers.

He hated her. A fish thinks the world is wet. His was convinced she was sleeping around with her gambling partners. Sexual desire comes naturally to all -- young and old, men and women. She too had desires, but she never acted on them, perhaps secretly hoping that her husband would someday return to her and things would be  like they were in the good old days. She did not deny his charges of cheating  because she wanted him to feel the pain she had felt when she learned of all the women he had been around with. "See how it hurts" she would tell him only to be slapped by his drunken hands.

"Your mother is a whore" he yelled into the closed door of my creator's room once. A lie told a thousand times becomes the truth. My creator, angry at her for her gambling and boozing habits not to mention her large circle of male friends eventually and reluctantly believed his father.

***

When Suvit visited my creator in the ICU, he had been going back and forth between different states of consciousness where he sometimes saw his parents and the white walls of the hospital and at other times saw a dreamy and colorful world. One world was cold and  painful. It smelled anti-septic and germicidal. The other one was warm and smelled of berries and fruits. The sun was always shining on lush green pastures in this world. Tall trees and beautiful flowers grew on vast meadows with meandering rivers. His parents loved each other and the three of them held hands and went on a picnic alongside one such river. His mother was young and beautiful, without  dark circles around her eyes and  Pan Parag stains on her teeth. His dad was as radiant and warm as the sun and his breath did not smell of alcohol. He and his dad played badminton and Frisbee while his mother laid out fresh chicken sandwiches and lemonade.

Suvit was deeply saddened by the sight of his best friend at the door of death. He was never really angry with him for more than a few days after the incident with his sister but when you storm out like that, it's hard to undo what you did and go back. His throat was not big enough to swallow his pride.  He knew his sister well enough to know   she had been the initiator. He never wanted his sister with anyone. He was protective of her because as a young man he didn't know what else to be when it came to her. Perhaps that's why she chose to fall in love with his best friend. Perhaps she saw her own dada in his best friend. He knew how deeply she admired him. If there was any man worthy of his sister, it was his best friend lying in the hospital bed.

Suvit's heart was otherwise as cold as the polar icecaps. Confronted with the sight of his childhood friend drifting between various states of consciousness, he felt a burning sensation in his chest. The flames in his chest brought the ice age in his heart to an end. He hugged his best-friends mother and the flood gates opened. They both wept for ten long minutes.

***

Near-death studies have shown that people often hear a voice telling them to come back. Sometimes it is their own voice or sometimes it is the voice of a loved one. My creator not only heard the voices of his loved ones but also read their thoughts  while  chatting with Jogi Parmanand in the Valley of Flowers. If there could be a world  where he had loving parents who did not fight, if there could be a world where his dad did not cheat on his mom and she did not gamble and drink, where he could chat and spend time with his good friend and let bygones be bygones, where he could have a guilt-free relationship with the love of his life, then all the flowers in the Valley, all the happiness in the lake, all the warmth in the meadows, all the wisdom in Jogi Parmaned could not hold him back from that world.  He was coming back to live the life he deserved.

Three months after the accident, my creator was discharged from hospital. He is resting at home. I will be de-programmed and re-formatted first thing tomorrow morning. The world is not ready for an invention like me yet. Other people's minds are best left unread my creator and Suvit have concluded. Light would not be light without darkness. Good cannot be good without evil. Dark and evil thoughts we must all have, for they are borne out of our frustrations and come naturally to us. Such dark and deep thoughts eventually prove futile and result in good and pure thoughts. Purity of thought comes not from an unblemished source, a fountain of purity, but from a rational rejection of the impure thoughts that run through  our minds.

My creator and his friend will have ample opportunities to tell the world of their experiment. They will become the high priests of biophysics in due time. I wish them the very best. My time is up and I must now go. There is no Valley of Flowers or Lake of Happiness that awaits me.  I  go back into the vast expanse of nothingness that I was born of. I have seen the inside of the human mind and learned of it's infinite potential. Someday I or someone like me will be born again out of that very potential.

My creator let out a gentle snore. He plans to get married next month. I hope somebody gives him Snorex as a wedding present.

Rest well, my liege, rest well.

***

The End.

/* she swallowed the rest of the amber wine without tasting it. the play was over, the music ceased, the crowd filed out. one another dream had come to an end. and then, she logged into sajha.com. emotions leapt up in her; but resurrections don’t happen, they really don’t , and it wasn’t him. */

he always disappeared into an inaccessible dimension of his own but always returned. today he is here correct and present.  he had always talked of  keen and blind emotions, ambitions, and intentions. this time there is a new note in his piece , a note so unexpected that it takes a moment for the reader to realize that. with a story set up  between yesterday and tomorrow, in the country of lost happiness and peace, the place of mislaid calm-one could dissect all his previous work better than at first- no more mysteries or depths, only surfaces and revelations. absolutely mesmerizing, one will not be thinking and reading his words, only drinking in the tones of the writer’s voice.

 
one day i would like to sit and ponder why it seems that certain questions seem to come in waves. face the facts: the society we belong to is all treachery, all deception, hiding its nature, guarded and secret in spite of all its apparent nakedness.sometimes we feel like raising a middle finger at them all. yet, no matter how profoundly justified its cause, we personally could not get over the moral hurdles required to perform such acts on a regular basis.we have no time--no second of time to devote to the past. the needs of the present absorb our every faculty. a vision of the future like some dim, monster, but luckily to-morrow never comes.

think this: time passed. no, it did not pass. time stood still. beauty passed, loved passed, mulishnes passed.

“He never wanted his sister with anyone. He was protective of her because as a young man he didn't know what else to be when it came to her. Perhaps that's why she chose to fall in love with his best friend. perhaps she saw her own dada in his best friend. he knew how deeply she admired him.”

our lives, our stories, flowed into one another’s, are no longer our own, individual, isn’t it? i want to feel more than i ever felt before, after reading this. i badly wanna see a face, faces sts, a generation free from history or pain and no carry forwards at all.

happy new year! as it is said it is the first day of something, it is the last day of something else. hope to see more of you next year.

Best wishes

amber

wowwwwwwwww awesome story.

Superb. Enjoyed it.

SG,

 

If I were you, I would do a spoof on why this did not work here— if at all possible, with an essay entitled ‘I know what you read last summer’.

 

Humorists like Letterman, Jon Stewart, and Colbert work best when their jokes flop. Because the tone of their admission is usually simple: “I overrated my punch line.”

 

You are skilled enough to do that too. And I know you are modest enough NOT to utter: "You don't get me."     

 

You are a very talented writer. However, the genre you have chosen in your last couple of writings challenges my intelligence. I don’t want to be challenged; I just want to scroll through to the bottom.    

 

I have always believed bringing simplicity to what you write is the most complex thing to do. (But then, I also believe women shaving their armpit is not an option; it’s a chore.)     

 

I understood what you wrote, but I did not understand why. You have too much talent. Is it worth risking some by complexifying what oughta be simple?

 

Please argue.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Holidays are not over yet. In fact for most of us, tonight is the night. Finally after a couple of weeks of departure from my permanently sajha-logged-on computer, I signed in to see what did this virtual world had to offer.

Although I was already well familiar with your previous works, I first clicked on your post because of only 19 comments but almost 2500 hits. 

After I finished your story, I wished my computer screen went blank for ten seconds.

When your 'the creater' seeked solace in the Himalayas, I was there with him.

When you were in your creator's forehead, he saw me running away from him.

After all, 'Donnie Darko' was only a cult hit and 'The catcher in the rye' was more notorious than popular. I only meant not to let yourself bogged down by the flood of comments that you are not getting.

You made my week, and I thank you for that.

All the best.

Sorry ल? मेरो सम्झिदा सम्झिदै बिर्सने बानि छ के। एउटा कुरा राख्न मन लागेको थियो, बिर्सेछु, अहिले राख्दै छु ।

Coma बाट स्रिस्टिकर्ता नफर्कोस भन्ने मेरो मनले इच्छा गरिराखेको थियो के, कथा पढ्ने बेला । किनभने, मलाइ त्यसपछिको बखतमा त्यो चिपले के समाउन सक्दो रहेछ भन्ने जिज्ञासा लागेर । कथाको बिचबाट alternative story लेख्न मिल्छ भने त्यता तिर घुमाएर एउटा लहरो तानम् न । पिलिज ।

Amber:

Thank you. You said so much, so beautifully, so well that you've left me without much of a response other than to say I read your comments a couple of times, each time with a fresh smile, finding new meaning in your words.

... time passed. no, it did not pass. time stood still. beauty passed, loved passed, mulishness passed

Yes, how we bark up the wrong tree. Then when we find the right tree, we have laryngitis.

Happy 2008!

Uptowngal:

Thanks. Have a great 2008.

Sum_Off:

How are you? Thanks for the comments. You've given me  many talking points; I hope on purpose. As for  how well this story has fared, it has exceeded my expectations and I am happy about it. Based on what I have experienced with some of the other stories, including an incomplete one (my new year's resolution is to complete it this year), I am quite aware of the limited appeal of something like this. Thanks for the concern though; the goodwill behind it is palpable and much appreciated.

the genre you have chosen in your last couple of writings challenges my intelligence. I don’t want to be challenged; I just want to scroll through to the bottom.   

There are others, including yourself, who are far more talented than me, and I say this not merely out of politeness or courtesy but with sincerity, who can do a far better job with the type of story you mention. There is often a tussle between what the readers want to read and what the writer wants to say; you might have experienced it too. I certainly believe in the  great American tradition of literary simplicity; however, and I chose a semicolon there, there are times when I feel what the heck, there are no binding rules in literature, and if there are, it's okay to break them sometimes. There is a certain thrill to breaking rules, somewhat like stealing your neighbor's alu bokhra as a kid or making that illegal U-turn (the latter comes with a "don't-try-this-at-home" warning).

I wrote this story believing  there were enough  people on this forum who would read it. They may not be there in the multitudes but I don't seek the multitudes. The multitudes scare me; I am incapable of  pleasing them, their expectations are too high; they want me to write  about things they can relate to,  in a way they can relate to, using language and metaphors they can relate to. It's often their way or the highway. I prefer the highway. There is more artistic freedom there, more room to speed up and slow down, change lanes and take exits. That is  why I write. That  is also my response to your point "I understood what you wrote, but I did not understand why."

Lastly, on a light note, I know what you read last summer, not you Sum_off, but you and you over there. Own up now, how was Paris Hilton's Diaries?

I wish you a very happy 2008 and look forward to reading more of you in the new year.

Kevin Ekstrom:

I must confess haven't watched the movie or read the book although the synopsis for both sounded very interesting. I plan to check them out. As for the comments, you made my week with yours, so we are even now. Thank you and happy new year.

Copycat:

The idea did cross my mind. I had made provisions for that eventuality by making the chip self-destructible. I suppose when rigor mortis set in, the ionic imbalances in the human body would have short circuited and fried the chip. If not, it would have been consumed by the flames of the funeral pyre and it's ashes dispersed into the Bagmati along with it's creator's. Or maybe not, at the rate at which it was learning, it might have even learned to desire, to live, to procreate. Infinite possibilities well beyond the scope of a story on Sajha or my literary skills.  

Your curiosity is a compliment, thank you. Happy new year to you.

Sajha_Gazer,
I read first part on the very first day you posted, and as Ive mentioned in earlier post, it was rather boring. Not a kind of story which you used to post i.e. Dating Miss Sajha, I met her in Sajha and many others. I though it was boring but when I forced myself to complete the story only because of Sajha_Gazer brand, Im being very honest here. Then  i found it really moving. Its a different write up but I enjoyed it, I think u r experimenting yourself with different style . Keep it up my friend

Wishing you a very happy New year and hope to read your interesting stores in coming years too And hey when is your incomplete story coming out? I think its already 2008

One final note, happy to see good chemistry between two great writers of Sajha Sum_Off and Sajha_Gazer